By focusing laser light to brightness one billion times greater than the surface of the Sun, a team of physicists from the United States and China has observed changes in a vision-enabling interaction between light and matter. Those changes yielded unique X-ray pulses with the potential to generate extremely high-resolution imagery useful for medical, engineering, scientific and security purposes.
The team, headed by Professor Donald Umstadter, director of the Extreme Light Laboratory University of Nebraska-Lincoln, fired an ultra-high-intensity laser system, DIOCLES, at helium-suspended electrons to measure how the laser’s photons scattered from a single electron after striking it.
“Under typical conditions, as when light from a bulb or the Sun strikes a surface, that scattering phenomenon makes vision possible,” Prof. Umstadter said.
“But an electron – the negatively charged particle present in matter-forming atoms – normally scatters just one photon of light at a time. And the average electron rarely enjoys even that privilege, getting struck only once every four months or so.”
Though previous laser-based experiments had scattered a few photons from the same electron, Prof. Umstadter and co-authors managed to scatter more than 500 photons at a time.
At the ultra-high intensities produced by DIOCLES, both the photons and electron behaved much differently than usual.
“When we have this unimaginably bright light, it turns out that the scattering — this fundamental thing that makes everything visible — fundamentally changes in nature,” Prof. Umstadter said.
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